Hit Based Giving for Global Development

Summary

There is a lack of ad­vice in EA for in­di­vi­d­u­als on where to donate if they value global de­vel­op­ment and are okay with high risk, high re­ward in­ter­ven­tions—hit based giv­ing.

This gap could be closed by us­ing the EA fund for global de­vel­op­ment. This could also lead to in­creased fund­ing for more ex­per­i­men­tal, ne­glected or­gani­sa­tions and in­ter­ven­tions that are less likely to re­ceive in­sti­tu­tional money.

Problem

There may be a miss­ing gap when it comes to effec­tive al­tru­ism and sys­temic change in global de­vel­op­ment. This post from 80,000 Hours in 2015 - “Effec­tive al­tru­ists love sys­temic change”—high­lights many ways in which effec­tive al­tru­ism can be used to pur­sue le­gal, cul­tural and poli­ti­cal changes. But it seems that when it comes to in­di­vi­d­u­als donat­ing, who value global de­vel­op­ment, most ad­vice is still to give via char­i­ties that have strong ev­i­dence be­hind them rather than higher risk, higher re­ward op­tions.

For gov­ern­ments and foun­da­tions they can use re­search from a wide va­ri­ety of think tanks like CGD or ODI but for in­di­vi­d­u­als that want to sup­port po­ten­tially more im­pact­ful or­gani­sa­tions there isn’t that much ded­i­cated re­search out there.

GiveWell

Givewell does look at qual­i­ta­tive info, but rep­u­ta­tion­ally are look­ing for harder ev­i­dence, so may not want to ex­pand their crite­ria. Th­ese two quotes be­low high­light their po­si­tion.

“We have strict crite­ria about the sorts of char­i­ties we recom­mend. Th­ese crite­ria are partly about achiev­ing max­i­mum im­pact, but partly about hav­ing recom­men­da­tions that oth­ers can fairly eas­ily be con­fi­dent in...Thus, we think there may be many giv­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties that are bet­ter than our top char­i­ties but don’t meet our crite­ria and/​or are not known to us.”

“Root-causes-based ap­proaches are, in our view, the kind of spec­u­la­tive and long-term un­der­tak­ings that are best suited to highly en­gaged donors”

“[IGI] plans to make grants to part­ner­ships be­tween gov­ern­ments, J-PAL offices, and af­fili­ated re­searchers to help pi­lot and scale ev­i­dence-in­formed pro­grams in ed­u­ca­tion, health, and so­cial as­sis­tance.”

There is also a chance that dona­tions from peo­ple in­ter­ested in effec­tive al­tru­ism can be given to more ex­per­i­men­tal and/​or newer or­gani­sa­tions and in­ter­ven­tions.

This might be the main ad­van­tage of EA dona­tions in this space, will­ing­ness to fund hard or im­pos­si­ble to mea­sure in­ter­ven­tions that might be ne­glected by larger fun­ders. This could be donat­ing to meta or­gani­sa­tions like GiveWell or AidGrade. It could be dona­tions for or­gani­sa­tions work­ing di­rectly on lob­by­ing, re­search, ac­countabil­ity check­ing, ad­vo­cacy, im­prov­ing jour­nal­ism, data col­lec­tion, etc. It could also fund think tanks that ad­vise gov­ern­ments, such as CGD, JPAL.

Pos­si­ble Next Steps

If there is pos­i­tive feed­back about the re­cent dona­tion choice by the EA fund for global de­vel­op­ment it may make more sense to use that fund to donate to or­gani­sa­tions in a more port­fo­lio based ap­proach similar to the EA fund for an­i­mal welfare. - “The fund [an­i­mal welfare] could sup­port newer but still promis­ing or­ga­ni­za­tions with less ev­i­dence to sup­port them or or­ga­ni­za­tions with smaller fund­ing gaps”.

If there is nega­tive feed­back about the di­rec­tion the EA fund for global de­vel­op­ment has taken with it’s lat­est dona­tion there could be a new fund, man­aged by a team of peo­ple who have a va­ri­ety of back­grounds in global de­vel­op­ment. This al­lows donors to give to the fund that matches their risk ap­petite.

A third but less likely op­tion is set­ting up an or­gani­sa­tion similar to GiveWell or ACE to re­search these kinds of in­ter­ven­tions from the point of view of in­di­vi­d­ual donors.

I work part-time with a foun­da­tion that some­times uses a “hits-based” ap­proach to global de­vel­op­ment sup­port. Here are some of the things we’ve looked at, though we didn’t end up fund­ing all of them:

My im­pres­sion from this ex­pe­rience, though I’m cer­tainly not an ex­pert in the area:

For a donor who is giv­ing sub-$10,000 amounts, many of these ap­proaches are difficult to take; there isn’t a lot of pub­lic in­for­ma­tion on in­di­vi­d­ual re­search pro­jects, the state of a pro­ject might change quickly, and it’s hard to get much ad­di­tional in­for­ma­tion by talk­ing to re­searchers. Be­cause the foun­da­tion gives larger amounts, we’re able to rou­tinely ar­range phone calls with char­i­ties and even with out­side re­searchers who are in­ter­ested in an op­por­tu­nity to ed­u­cate a large donor.

Some­thing like a crowd­fund­ing plat­form (or some other run­ning list of “un­der­funded pro­jects”) might help to close the gap, but it would take a lot of work from J-PAL, IPA, and other de­vel­op­ment re­search or­ga­ni­za­tions to put this to­gether, and I don’t know how high the de­mand would be out­side a frac­tion of the EA com­mu­nity.

· look­ing into cause ar­eas iden­ti­fied by Char­ity Science which could benefit from fund­ing and entrepreneurship

· look­ing into or­gani­sa­tions and re­lated broader in­ter­ven­tions show­cased in ‘Life You Can Save’ web­site, I’m un­clear on the rigour of the re­search un­der­pin­ning those recom­men­da­tions though.

I also hope to fol­low the re­search on im­pact of ad­vo­cacy pro­jects such as the one Rachel Glen­ner­ster men­tioned in the 80000 hours pod­cast late last year. I agree, in the im­me­di­ate term EA global is a good choice though I am less clear on how the feed­back loop for EA funds works. You recom­mend fol­low­ing the feed­back on EA funds to de­ter­mine next steps. Who pro­vides pos­i­tive/​nega­tive feed­back on the di­rec­tion of EA global funds? Would love to know your thoughts and learn fur­ther.

I don’t think there is a sys­tem­atic pro­cess for feed­back for the EA funds at the mo­ment. It’s mainly ad hoc with the fund man­agers gath­er­ing feed­back them­selves, peo­ple emailing them or fo­rum posts like this one.

There may also be a way of tel­ling by look­ing at how much peo­ple con­tinue to give to each fund, al­though I don’t know how closely donors are mon­i­tor­ing the even­tual im­pact.

ACE does largely work in re­la­tion to in­sti­tu­tional change com­pared to in­di­vi­d­ual change. But not re­ally sys­tems change, at least not in a more rad­i­cal sense. Most of the work is about main­stream­ing change through a dom­i­nant cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, which is some­thing that foun­da­tions seem to be pretty com­fortable with. So it doesn’t challenge the roots of the is­sues but seems to cut away at the branches in a fairly sin­gle is­sue type way. The or­gani­sa­tions that effec­tive al­tru­ists tend to sup­port are gen­er­al­ist, par­tic­u­larly en­gaged in welfare and “veg” ap­proaches, not those en­gaged with ed­u­cat­ing around speciesism or tak­ing broad based jus­tice ap­proaches. Per­haps EA Funds will do more work around these is­sues and maybe ACE is go­ing to as well, though i feel there is a gen­eral sense that di­rect work around jus­tice is­sues is con­sid­ered too de­mand­ing, which is why in­cre­men­tal­ism from within sys­tems is preferred. How­ever, al­most in­evitably effec­tive an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy has re­flected some as­pects of these harm­ful sys­tems.